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Last night Ad Frank and his lovely Fast, Easy Women began their April Tuesday residency at the Lizard Lounge. Next week they'll be joined by Well, featuring Ad's fabulous former bandmate Linda Bean; you can check out a complete schedule for the residency at Ad Frank's website. I like the Lizard, although it's a very small, rectangular, acoustically hard space, and thus, on nights (like last night, in a big way) when the sound is turned up way too loud it can be kind of deafening. As a result, I absolutely had to wear ear plugs, which I hate, and couldn't hear some of the details in the music all that well.
Opening the evening were the Alps. (From New York!) They were kind of poorly mixed, with the bass up so high that it was hard to make out what else was going on. (Yes, some of that was the earplugs, but not all of it, as I could hear Ad Frank's guitarist much better.) The lead singer was young and gay and Morissey, which is all right, I suppose, but he had a pretty approximate sense of pitch. Not as bad as the Angels of Light guy; at least I could always tell what note he was trying to hit. But not all that great, either. Without a clearly audible guitar part to distract me, it didn't make for a very enjoyable set.
Up next, after a brief interlude with Mister (Drag King lip-synch with construction paper), was Ad Frank. He came out alone and did a couple of songs--one cover and one apparently written for the occasion, if not some other April Fools Tuesday--alone with keyboard before the Fast, Easy Women joined him. Ad writes great songs, and he's a wonderful performer, but his vocal timbre can be kind of regrettable: sort of high and thin and nasal. It does get better as a set goes on, though; maybe he just needs to warm up more. Or maybe it's that he sings better when he's drunk, since he usually drinks a lot on stage. This also leads to him exposing himself a lot, and that's always nice. Anyway, having him do a couple of songs alone first meant that he was more warmed up when the band came out, and they did a pretty great set. The Fast, Easy Women are an insanely tight combo. Half of them are in Quick Fix, whom I liked very much. I'm really impressed with the drummer, who can seemingly do anything from mindless New Wave oontz (say it out loud; you'll see), which works really well in one of the songs, to some really amazing parts. The guitarist also plays some really great and (I'm gonna borrow Ad's own comment from his website here) "gorgeously un-guitarlike guitar parts". And we have a bit of a crush on the bassist, I think. Most of these songs were new to us, and good; we picked up the new CD, so they should be more familiar soon. Local chanteuse Paula Kelly joined him at the end for two songs, including the aforementioned great New Wave number, The Ticket Was Nonrefundable.
Last up were Soltero. They were doing a fun power-pop thing, with feel-good songs and (when I could hear them--damned ear plugs!) goofy lyrics. The drummer appeared to be having some kind of seizure. I liked this band at first, but about halfway through the set it started to suffer from a serious sameness. For this reason we eventually gave up on them and left. None of it was bad, but enough is enough.
